My first week of full classes at Utopia Planitia Interplanar University, Alan Mendelsohn tripped me right in the middle of the quad.

I was walking back from class, arms full of books and films, only glancing up once in awhile to make sure I didn't run into anyone, when Alan unexpectedly met my eyes across a field of puce-colored grass and I felt my center of balance shift out from under me.

I <I>still</i> don't know how he did it that time - he won't tell me, and I can't figure it out. I thought I'd learned all his trips; I'd even mastered the Missile Whistle, finally, earlier that summer, and none of the purely mental methods have worked on me for years - but it was a <i>spectacular</i> trip. I went over backward, arms flailing wildly, in a shower of loose schoolwork. Half the students were already staring at me, because I was that weird kid from Earth who was probably sort of backwards; now that I'd proved I was backwards, they were <i>all</i> staring at me.

I felt at home for the first time since I'd unpacked the first suitcase into my dorm room. A grin spread over my face, and I just lay there, in the middle of the pathway, laughing uncontrollably, until a couple of girls with four arms and green skin took pity on me and gathered my stuff up.

It wasn't hysterical laughter, either. I just felt that good.

When I finally made it back to my dorm, my roommate was already waiting for me. She was a tall, bronze-skinned Venusian named Dano Nakamura who was majoring in Xenomusicology and terrified the bejeezus out of me half the time. 

"Saw you trip over yourself on the quad," she said. "Good one, Neeble."

"Best thing that happened to me all day," I told her cheerfully, and fist-bumped her before I flopped down on my bed.


The thing is, my friendship with Alan Mendelsohn had been kind of weird ever since I came to UPIPU. I mean, we were still friends; we'd spent every summer together since we were thirteen, and we'd pretty much been sleeping together since that time a few years later when I was trying to teach him my latest yoga positions and things got a bit out of hand. Since we'd both got in, there'd never really been any question that we'd attend UPIPU together. But this summer I'd hardly seen him at all - there'd been all sorts of difficulty with my admission and immigration paperwork that required me to shift back and forth between UPIPU on ----- plane Mars, home on Earth, ----- where the main immigration offices were, and eventually, when I realized my honorary citizen would come in hand, Waka-Waka, too.

Apparently being the first person from your planetary plane to go to school offworld menas a ton of extra paperwork. I think I saw more of Alan's <i>mom</i>, in her job at the High Commissioner's Office, than I did of Alan. And then I had to go to the special six-weeks remedial summer session for students from 'developing' planets, which meant that by the time Alan showed up for standard Freshman orientation, I already knew my way around. That's why we weren't rooming together - he'd had to choose his housing way back when I wasn't even sure I'd be able to officially enroll this year, and when that was all straightened out , my advisore suggested that rather than inconvenience everyone by requesting a last-minute switch, I should just get a random roommate for a semester. It would be a good way to make other friends anyway, she said, which made sense.

I had managed to stop by Alan's dorm once to say 'hi,' but we'd barely had time for more than that before he had to run off to meet a upperclassman cousin of his or something.

I'd been wondering if maybe he didn't want to hang out as much any moer - he hadn't been afraid of catching social leprosy back in West Kangaroo Park, but back then, he'd been one of the weird kids, too, in the wrong city on the wrong planet. Here, he was at home, and he fit in a way he never had on Earth. And besides, college is different from Junior High. Maybe he wanted a clean start.

I figured I was okay with that, if he wanted it. After all, I could make a clean start too. I'd done it before, when he moved back to Mars the first time, and I could do it again. I wondered if anyone would blink twice if I started carrying an actual leper's bell, or if they'd just put it down to some weird Hogoboroite religous custom.

But if Alan was tripping me from across the quad, that meant he was still the same Alan, and it really <I>matter</i> if we couldn't hang out the same way any more, as long as Alan was still Alan. I couldn't help noticing that I was the only person he'd tripped so far, either. I let myself just lay on my bed and bask for a long time while Dano rolled her eyes at the strange ways of Earth people and played something sort of like music on a seven-stringed guitar-thing.
